A pint is yours if you can solve this conundrum for me (a theoretical explanation you can convince me of will do; I have a practical workaround).

A few weeks ago I replaced some of the bulbs in my house with energy-saving ones. However, the ceiling light in my hall behaves in a very odd manner. Occasionally, after I switch it off at the wall, it flickers on very briefly (for about 1/10 second) about once every minute - even though the power is (allegedly) off. The flicker is fairly dim, so I only notice it at night. If I take the bulb out of the socket, the flicker stops. If I put it back, it starts again. This behaviour happily continues for hours - to the extent that I remove the bulb when it happens because it’s too distracting when trying to sleep.

Milwaukee, Minnesota is an engaging story about Albert, a mentally retarded ice fisher in Milwaukee (which keen observers of American geography will note is actually in Wisconsin). It starts out gently, but quickly turns into a mystery, with various parties vying for Albert’s attention and the money left after his over-protective mother died.

Albert is played by Troy Garity, who at times looks uncannily like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Good supporting performances come from Randy Quaid and others, who do a good job of conveying complex sub-plots and old grievances without saying a word.

For anyone who hasn’t heard, there are new EU-wide regulations on hand baggage - which have the effect of slightly relaxing the rules that were in place at UK airports (although there are still plenty of awkward gotchas). The implication of this, of course, is that either the original terrorist threat has subsided (although it would be nice for the security ‘services’ to explain why), or that they panicked and couldn’t handle the situation they suddenly found themselves in. Either way, I suspect the next knee-jerk reaction isn’t far off. In the meantime, maybe this will reduce the number of annoyed executives having to check in an overnight bag.

The History Boys is a little different from some of the other ‘up-North-lads-do-good pictures of recent years (Full Monty, Billy Elliott). Firstly, it is a bit intelligent (although it’s probably a bit unfair to expect the Full Monty to be intelligent, superb though it is, and there’s still a lot of English-lit. and philosophical self-indulgence in The History Boys). It’s a strong character-focused film, and masterfully acted by a surprisingly large set of prominent performers (who aren’t really as young as they look), as well as being hilarious to boot - to the extent that the more serious scenes sometimes dull the film’s impact.

Richard posted a link to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’s multi-guess Economic Literacy Test. Most of it was fairly easy if you know the standard economic textbook viewpoint on capitalism (which allows for a few market failures but is mostly fairly single-minded about the market’s ability to be efficient).

Unlike Richard, though, I only managed 11/13 on the first pass. So in true bad loser style, it’s time to defend myself. I got the right answer second time round on both questions I failed on, and I was dithering over two possible answers on both. One mistake was because of the ambiguous use of the phrase ‘public interest’ in the question (they actually meant: make goods and services people want, I thought of cuddly things like clouds and cars that don’t pollute). The other was to do with high inflation and the money supply - mah, I’ve never understood macroeconomics properly anyway. Plus it was the 12th question and I was getting slapdash…

Google have created a powerful brand based on creating simplicity from complexity (what all good IT is about). Their tools aren’t perfect, but they’ve made life easier for billions, and so I think they still deserve some free feedback from time-to-time. So, a few thoughts:

• Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them. All you have to do is invent a speech-to-text interpreter that actually works reliably. Simple. [Note: as I sometimes do, I wrote this post in advance of it being published. I’ve since discovered that such a tool already exists. However, I thought I’d leave the original prose here: Google, if you get one out soon, you could still corner the market]

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I’ve upgraded my interweb connection to Web 2.0 in the last few months. Although no-one can really point to what Web 2.0 is (even though there’s a validator for it), many people feel that they know it when they see it. I now defend the term against cynics because I think it’s genuinely useful. To me, it’s a combination of little things: blogging and feedreading, a good quality web browser, in-place dynamic web sites (mostly driven by AJAX), to name but a few. For a technically minded person, I’m atypically late adopting, and so I’ve only recently happened on two powerful aspects of Web 2.0:

Chris Tomkins and I both work on the WebSphere ESB team, and have been blogging about it and related IBM SOA products for some months. We’ve now decided to join forces and launch a new blog called SOA Tips ’n’ Tricks. This will contain technical tips on ESB and other products as well as wider issues - we don’t know exactly how it will evolve so please feel free to leave us some feedback on the things you read - what you like, and what you don’t. I plan to discontinue writing about ESB or SOA specifically here on my personal blog, although I’ll continue to discuss wider IBM issues.

Rated X is a film about the (ahem) adult film industry, so sensitive eyes might want to stop reading this review now. It stacks up well against other films of the genre, such as Boogie Nights (although it’s not as funny), and The People vs. Larry Flynt (although it’s not as political). The film tells a frequently unfulfilled dream: two brothers (well played by real-life brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen) want to make porn that isn’t just cheap and tacky, but tells a story.

My recent posting regarding the Screenselect/LOVEFiLM merger elicited a lot of (mostly unfavourable) comments from strangers regarding LOVEFiLM’s poor service. So far I hadn’t seen any of that, but their website has just refused to downgrade my package (i.e allow me to reduce my spend with them). I’ve sent an email, but as others have pointed out, they have pre-prepared excuses ready about the high volumes of email they are getting (hint: this isn’t OK, LOVEFiLM, you should have expected it). We’ll see how fast this problem gets sorted: is this the start of a slippery slope which ends in me cancelling my account? Time will tell.